Improve Conversion

How life was easy with just one browser, however today there are several browsers your customers could be using.

Additionally each browser has different versions and you should conduct several tests to ensure all visitors can access and use your site. The more visitors that can use your site effectively, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Let’s think about this in a traditional retail environment, imagine you spend money on a promotion to try and drive visitors to your store. This works however as you assume all your customers are over 6 foot tall, you build shelves so high that 20% of you visitors that are 4 foot tall cannot see items on the shelves, let alone buy them. By not catering for all visitors you could be cutting off some customers. This would never happen in a retail shop and the same should apply to online.

What browsers do online consumers use?

Internet Explorer is still dominating the market but Firefox and Safari now account for 30% of visitors. Typically we see the breakdown as:

• 70%  Internet Explorer
• 20%  Firefox
• 7%     Safari
• 1.5% Google Chrome

Within Internet Explorer alone at the time of writing there are three versions

• 6 (65%),
• 7 (25%)
• 8 (10%)

We have sometimes spent days ensuring that a site displays correctly in IE6 as well as IE7 and now we have to work on IE8 too. As you can see there are sufficient numbers on each of these browsers to ensure this work is done.

How to ensure your site works on all browsers?

There are free and paid for tools to run tests in all browsers but often this just gives you a snapshot of any issues. You really need to go through all pages and functionality to make sure everything displays and works correctly.

Each of our staff work on a different platform and browser, so each person can test any website on all platforms when quality testing and spot issues quicker.

Your stats package or analytics will have information on what browsers and versions your customers are using. Don’t ignore it.